Loser

Loser

Years ago, my young niece picked my sister’s wedding ring from the top of her dresser and headed across the street to the sandlot to play Buried Treasure.   Her optimistic, hopeful little self thought this a grand idea.  As the game wore on and her attention drifted, eventually the buried and reburied ring could no longer be unearthed.  The day’s treasure stayed lost.   (Also lost:  my sister’s temper and my niece’s privilege of going outside.)

I’m a loser.  I’m constantly losing my keys, glasses, phone, the remote.  I have more than once lost my car in a parking lot.  I lose my way.  Before GPS, it would stress me out to drive even into our town’s small square because I would inevitably take a wrong turn.  I lose my temper, I lose track, I lose my train of thought, but sadly, rarely my appetite or weight.   On occasion, I’ve lost sleep, sanity, wits, and most of my marbles.  Somewhere along the way, I lost my flexibility, youth, virginity, and solid memory, not necessarily in that order.

My kids lose things too.  They’ve lost teeth, ball games, earphones, shoes, textbooks, glasses, retainers.  Big things:  confidence, innocence, friends, judgement, freedoms and privileges.  We lost an inner tube at the ocean once, watched helplessly as it floated away with the rip tide, imagined it beaching itself someday in Australia, providing a brief rest stop for seagulls along its way.

We are a nation of losers.   I read recently that last year the TSA pocketed $675,000 in lost loose coins from airport security.  There’s a crazy place in Scottsboro, Alabama called the Unclaimed Baggage Center.  It’s like a constant, dynamic warehouse-sized yard sale of the contents from people’s lost luggage.  You can get anything there, from electronics to wedding dresses to oriental rugs people have shipped–and lost.   It’s kind of a voyeuristic experience, sifting through someone else’s belongings to find fascinating objects.  I feel bad buying things, imagining somewhere a bereft and naked bride weeps while strangers try on her gown in a fitting room in Alabama.

We can’t hold onto anything.  We lose sunglasses and cameras at amusement parks.  We lose our lunches after riding the rides.  We lose sobriety, opportunities, jobs, hair, faith, hope.  We lose touch with friends and family and eventually, inevitably, we lose parents, friends, spouses.  If we let it, our whole lives can seem like nothing more than a series of losses from beginning to end.

I used to create scavenger hunts for my kids with rhyming clues.  It didn’t matter what they were searching for, a pack of gum or small toy.  Excited by the hunt, they loved to race each other around the house from clue to clue.   Somewhere along the way, we eventually stopped this game, and I wonder if they even remember that we did it at all.   When is it that we stop being delighted by what’s next?  Somehow a gradual film slides over us, dimming the light of discovery and optimism.  We grow from expectant, wide-eyed children where everything is magical to jaded, cynical grumps waiting for the other shoe to fall.

When my kid brother was around two years old, our family spent a day at Disney World. For weeks, my parents had been trying get him to give up his pacifier (“binky”).  If they hid it, he’d hunt through the house like a bloodhound.  That day at Disney, my father carted my brother around on his shoulders so he could see the costumed characters.  Goofy walked up and mimed for the binky.  When my brother wasn’t forthcoming, Goofy plucked it from his mouth, waved, and was swallowed by the crowd.  It was a tense moment of truth for my parents.  Because of this sadistic giant dog, would they now be subject to hours of wailing in a crowded amusement park?   Luckily for them, it went the other way.  My brother considered the loss for a brief moment, and then something in him relaxed.  Apparently, when Goofy makes off with your pacifier, resistance is futile and it’s time to give it up.  Parents of toddlers take note.

The point is, the day was so filled with awaiting magic that the loss of his favorite object could be overlooked.  Something great was just around the corner and he couldn’t waste time grousing.  He had morphed from a loser to a finder.

Obviously, every day is not a trip to Disney World.  Every loss is not a toddler’s binky.  Some days you just want to pull the covers over your head and take refuge in chocolate.  I get it:  some losses shake you to the pit of your soul and will be carried and mourned until your last breath.  But sometimes we make every inconvenience, every change of plans, lost thing, or blip on the radar into The Way Things Are And Will Forever Be Amen.  It changes us into losing losers instead of expectant finders.  Negative grimacers clutching and clinging onto every bit of control as if somehow our scrabbling could prevent any future losses.   Hey, don’t get me wrong.  I love control.  Control is my favorite!   But chasing it is as futile as Goofy absconding with your kid brother’s binky.  Most things, really almost everything, I’ve realized, is beyond my control.  Way beyond.  Except, ironically, my reaction to being a loser.

If I’m holding with white knuckles to those things I’ve lost, or am afraid of losing, my hands are too full to accept all the other great gifts waiting for me.

I’ve been a losing loser from day one.  We all have.  The trick is remembering that, like my niece, we are all also in a scavenger hunt for that buried treasure.  Clues are everywhere. Underneath our lost loser selves we are, if we allow ourselves to be, finders.  Right next to the lost luggage, keys, and wedding rings are mango gelato, holding hands, and tiny baby deer along the roadside.   We can find strength, faith, and the good in others.  If we look, we can find grace, coating everything like a fine dew, an abundant, amazing grace that can gently nudge us from discouraged griping into joy and wonder.   Treasure indeed, and finder’s keeper’s.